Comptel Customer Chorus Wins Second GTB Innovation Award for Innovative Broadband Project

Posted: May 18th, 2015 | Author: | Filed under: Events | Tags: , , | 1 Comment »

Fibre optic technology continues to fulfil its promise as the fastest way to deliver Internet and communications services worldwide, and over the years, we have helped operators successfully and cost-effectively deploy the technology.

For one, Comptel is pleased to be associated with partner GE Digital Energy and operator Chorus, who received a 2015 Global Telecoms Business (GTB) Innovation Award in the category of fixed network infrastructure innovation. It is the second consecutive year in which our team was honoured for our work on the ambitious project in New Zealand.

Chorus is the largest telecoms infrastructure provider in New Zealand. The company was created shortly after the 2009 launch of New Zealand’s Ultra-Fast Broadband (UFB) initiative, which seeks to deliver fibre-optic broadband to 75 percent of the country’s population by 2020. Challenged to meet the UFB’s aggressive short-term implementation deadlines – schools, hospitals and 90 percent of businesses in New Zealand needed to be fibre-enabled by 2015 – Chorus turned to Comptel.

In the first phase of their project, we initiated an “intelligent evolution” of Chorus’ infrastructure, which evaded traditional upgrade procedures in favour of a holistic approach. As a result, Chorus was able to reduce the time required to provision fibre services to customers’ homes by 40 percent, reduce the time needed to train staff on fibre technology and complete the entire project in just one year. You can read all about that first phase in this fibre provisioning case study from Analysys Mason.

Our team’s win in this year’s GTB Innovation Awards is for the second phase of our work, which comprised the integration of logical and physical inventory. We worked together with GE Digital Energy and relied on TM Forum Frameworx to combine our inventory systems in a way that best served Chorus’ needs. As of early 2015, Chorus achieved an end-to-end provisioning solution that enabled the automatic processing of service requests, which means little manual work is now needed to process orders for fibre service, send installation instructions to field crews and activate the service.

An efficient provisioning solution and accurate physical inventory also means technicians spend less time clarifying records, which unlocks better efficiency in the field, faster install times for customers and a stronger foundation for improved fault resolution and asset maintenance.

“The feedback I have received so far from the field seems to be very positive,” said Gemma Cleland of Transfield Services, a Chorus contractor. “They are especially happy with the additional inventory information that they are now getting provided.”

Comptel is proud to once again be recognised as an innovator in the provisioning and delivery of a new generation of communications services. We recognise both the emerging telecoms trends that push operators to innovate, as well as the challenges operators face in deploying the solutions that address those trends. As a result, we’re ready to help our customers meet these challenges head on, while acknowledging that our work has only just begun.

Both Comptel and GE Digital Energy will be in Nice, France for TM Forum Live! from 1 – 4 June, 2015. Email [email protected] to arrange an in-person meeting at the event. And download our new book, Operation Nexterday, to learn more about the creative ways leading digital and communications service providers can meet new market challenges.


The Moment of Truth: Identifying Data’s Peak Point of Value

Posted: May 4th, 2015 | Author: | Filed under: Industry Insights | Tags: , , , | Comments Off on The Moment of Truth: Identifying Data’s Peak Point of Value

What could be more frustrating than learning you missed a great opportunity simply because you didn’t have the information you needed in time? Many operators today miss such opportunities every minute either because their data is too old to be relevant any longer, or their systems are too slow to react to new data in-the-moment.

Given the nature of buying digital services today, information ages fast. Learning about your customers’ needs and preferences hours or even minutes later may be too late to engage their peak interest. Instead, digital and communications services providers need to be able to capture, process and draw insights from data, so they can act on it at the point of its peak value – the moment it is created.

This issue was at the heart of a recent Comptel webinar, “Data Refinery: The Facility for Intelligent Fast Data.” I was joined by Tero Lindholm, senior product manager at Comptel, to provide an overview of the challenges at hand for operators who want to make the most of data and digital buying opportunities.

Those opportunities are the result of a “perfect storm” in telco. On the demand side, a huge number of devices and apps are flooding the market, all of which are being consumed by Generation Cloud – those digital natives who want services on their terms and who play by their own rules.

On the infrastructure side, advancements in technology – from hyper-fast digital connections via 4G, 5G and fixed broadband, to the ongoing virtualisation of network resources, to the explosion of Big Data – require operators’ immediate attention.

At the convergence of these trends is a need for operators to re-write their existing service approach to match a new telecommunications reality. You need to bring new solutions to market in a new way that captures the interest of Generation Cloud, which is resistant to mass marketing, inflexible agreements and limited contracts. You also need to improve the underlying technology you use to support these new solutions, and ensure that as a digital and communications service provider, you are able to operate at a new speed of business.

One important component to this is data. With the right data in the right context, operators have the power to address consumers’ individual desires and needs.

But, as we suggest in the example above, data is only valuable if it is recent. Given the rapid-fire way Generation Cloud evaluates and purchases digital services, you need solutions that enable you to collect usage data from any source, enrich it with contextual information and analyse it in the moment for instant, real-time application in the form of immediate actions.

All of that needs to happen automatically, supported by embedded, machine-learning capabilities that allow your systems to more intelligently interpret data as time goes on. How do you do it?

Tero explains the Comptel Data Refinery solution in-depth in this webinar, and also highlights four practical cases in which Comptel customers applied the Data Refinery in a way to bring new innovative solutions to market faster than ever before.

Get the full story on the value of Intelligent Fast Data and having a Data Refinery to process it all. Click to replay our free webinar, “Data Refinery: The Facility for Intelligent Fast Data.”

Presenters:

Tero Lindholm, Senior Product Manager, Comptel

Malla Poikela, Head of Marketing, Intelligent Data, Comptel